Although
he is an engaging television personality, physicist Brian Cox can go way wrong when he veers into metaphysics, as when he advances
the completely groundless “fake physics” claim of an infinity of
parallel universes. Cox has recently claimed that research at the
Large Hadron Collider (the biggest machine used by physicists) has
ruled out ghosts.
Cox's
reasoning is that if there were ghosts or souls, they would have to
be made of some new type of particle that scientists hadn't yet
discovered; but such a new ghost particle hasn't been found by the
Large Hadron Collider; therefore, ghosts or souls don't exist. This
reasoning is fallacious.
Cox
has assumed that ghosts or souls must be made of some type of
undiscovered particles, that are either mass or energy. But this
assumption is invalid. We can imagine several different
possibilities:
Possibility
1: Souls or ghosts are not made of any type of matter or energy
at all, but consist of some utterly non-material thing that we may
call soul-stuff, spirit, or mind-stuff.
Possibility
2: Souls or ghosts are made of some special configuration of
ordinary energy such as photons.
Possibility
3: Souls or ghosts are made of some special configuration of
neutrinos, a particle that is known to be able to pass through solid
matter.
Possibility
4: Souls or ghosts are made of some undiscovered type of matter
or some undiscovered type of energy, different from anything
physicists are familiar with.
Based
on reports of ghost sightings, all of these are viable possibilities.
Evidence that ghosts can travel through walls is slight, so
Possibility 2 is still viable. Even if it could not travel through
walls, a ghost made only of photons might have various ways of
getting into a room, such as traveling through windows.
Now it
is clear that no results from the Large Hadron Collider do anything
at all to exclude the first three of these possibilities, because the
first three possibilities do not involve any type of new matter
particle or energy particle that wasn't known before the Large Hadron
Collider started operation several years ago. And also Possibility 4 is
also not excluded by results from the Large Hadron Collider, because
it's still perfectly possible that ghosts or souls may consist of
some undiscovered type of matter or undiscovered type of energy that
the Large Hadron Collider simply hasn't found yet.
Scientists
believe that a significant fraction of the universe's total substance
is something called dark matter. But no evidence for dark matter has
been produced by the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists believe that
most of the universe's substance is something called dark energy. But
no evidence for dark energy has been produced by the Large Hadron
Collider. But scientists have just kept on believing in dark matter
and dark energy, despite these negative findings. In light of such
facts, it is absurd or hypocritical for Cox to be speaking as if we shouldn't
believe in ghosts because no ghost particles have been found by the
Large Hadron Collider. To make such a claim is to evoke a rule (“If
the Large Hadron Collider didn't find it, it doesn't exist”) that
is exactly opposite to the rule scientists are following in regard to
the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter and dark energy.
What
exactly is the Large Hadron Collider? It's a gigantic ring-like
machine in which scientists accelerate particles to nearly the speed
of light, and crash them together. It's a machine that was designed not to search for ghosts,
but to partially replicate the high energy conditions near the time
of the Big Bang in which the universe was born. The Large Hadron
Collider tells us something about what particles appear under
insanely high-energy collisions that are about the least subtle
things imaginable – no more subtle than the condition under which
two jet planes might collide head on. Such a machine is, of course,
totally unsuitable for detecting some extremely subtle “ghost
energy” or “ghost particles” that might be associated with
ghosts or souls.
A messy particle collision at a particle acclerator
Prior
to Cox's comments on this matter, I cannot recall a single person who
has ever speculated that findings from the Large Hadron Collider had
the slightest relevance to the existence of ghosts or the existence
of a soul. Cox's attempt to draw a connection between the two is
highly imaginative, but unsubstantial.
Cox
also gives us some completely erroneous reasoning suggesting that the
Second Law of Thermodynamics argues against ghosts or the survival of
the soul. This is entirely fallacious. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics tells us that entropy tends to increase in a closed
system – meaning a system receiving no external inputs. If you
consider the universe as a closed system, such a law may predict
increased entropy in the universe as a whole in future eons. But the
Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us nothing about the lifetime of
an individual body (whether material or immaterial, biological or
ghostly) – for the simple reason that such things are not closed
systems, and may receive external inputs.
Very
weighty evidence for apparitions was accumulated in the classic
700-page scientific book Phantasms of the Living by Gurney,
which met high standards of corroboration. Cox doesn't want you to
believe in ghosts, which have been repeatedly observed by reliable
witnesses for centuries. But Cox does apparently want you to believe
in the infinitely more unbelievable “fake physics” idea of an
infinity of parallel universes, something for which there is not the
slightest bit of evidence. I, on the other hand, prefer to follow
the rule of: believe in proportion to the evidence, regardless of
your presumptions and expectations.
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